


My Comfort, My Home

by inkorrigible



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: 221B Baker Street, Angst, Comfort, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, John Watson - Freeform, Johnlock - Freeform, Kissing, Love Confessions, M/M, Memories, My First AO3 Post, Pre and Post Reichenbach, Sherlock Holmes - Freeform, Sherlock Holmes and Feelings, bad day, valentines day exchange
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-14
Updated: 2014-02-14
Packaged: 2018-01-12 08:19:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1184018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkorrigible/pseuds/inkorrigible
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock and John have both had hard days full of unwelcome memories, but coming home to each other brings realizations, confessions, and a comfort they can't find anywhere else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Comfort, My Home

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2014 Valentine's Day Johnlock Challenges exchange on tumblr. This is for toomerrymaiden (I'm sure there's a way to put in a url, but I don't know it. Sorry y'all.) Toomerrymaiden's prompt was: At the end of a long day/month/year he’s always there to come home to and he’ll understand and make everything OK.
> 
> It came out a little... well... a lot more angst-y than I'd originally planned, but I like to think it's all worth it. I also have decided to stick my fingers in my ears and ignore Mary's existence entirely, mostly because coming up with a plot with her in it would have given me a massive headache. It's also completely unbeta-ed and it hasn't been brit-picked either, because I didn't quite have enough time. Any errors are mine, a please feel free to tell me about them. This is also my first ever post to AO3, and actually, the first time I've ever posted any of my fic. So. Hope you like it. 
> 
> Happy Valentine's Day!

“Where thou art, that is home.” – Emily Dickinson

***

Sherlock Holmes was not known for trudging. He bounced, glided, ran, leapt, flailed, and generally ricocheted from one case to the next. Even his sulks were full of sharp gestures and snapped turns. Very occasionally, he would be perfectly, eerily still. But today, after chasing ghosts through the drug dens of the East End, he trudged up the steps of 221b looking very much like a man who’d taken on more than his share of cares. As it had turned out, the ghosts didn’t belong to the victims of the murderer he’d run to ground, but to his past. They followed him up the staircase and settled beside him when he curled into his chair.

He knew John was working late at the clinic. Despite the good doctor’s opinion of Sherlock’s attentiveness and the fact that he hadn’t been in the flat for more than five minutes at a stretch since Lestrade called him with the case two days ago, Sherlock remembered that tonight John was working late. A rash of cold and flu cases had left them flooded with patients and paperwork. Admittedly, Sherlock only remembered this because the killer – a now thoroughly unemployed pharmacist with far too little interesting to say – had been using cold medicine as the vehicle to poison his unsuspecting clients. But he remembered. Still, Sherlock thought, he should be here.

The ghosts of his memories stared at him in silent reproach, and he felt a pang of regret. Trying to shake off the weight of mistakes made years ago, he paced to the windows and pulled out his violin. He would wait. And his John would come home and the lingering ghosts would fade away.

*** 

John ran his hand through his hair as he paused on the street outside Speedy’s and looked up at the front door. The knocker was crooked, so he knew Sherlock was home for the first time in days, and that he was either sulking because his case was stalled or bouncing around the kitchen on his customary post-case high, conducting some heinous experiment that would no doubt involve body parts in teacups or maggots in the milk. After the day he’d had, he didn’t know if he was up to dealing with either possibility. His last patient had been draining. Sometimes, things struck far too close to home.

He huffed out a tired sigh and opened the door, shrugging off his coat as he entered. He walked slowly up the stairs, trying to brace himself for whatever variety of mess waited for him. He was so preoccupied that it wasn’t until he’d opened the flat door that he heard the music.

Sherlock was standing, gazing out the windows, swaying slightly while he played. John blinked. It hadn’t been what he was expecting, but he was too tired and drained to do anything but walk across the room and lower himself into his worn arm chair. The music was melancholy and low, and John thought it suited his mood perfectly. He dropped his head against the back of the chair and closed his eyes, breathing in the scent of Sherlock, a late autumn fire, and home. The feeling sunk into his bones. Suddenly, the sound of the violin stopped, and the graceful footsteps of his flatmate made their way over to the side of his chair.

“John,” came the rumble of Sherlock’s voice, “What is wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said, refusing to open his eyes. Knowing that if he did, Sherlock would see the lie written across his face like red ink on a failing exam. Hell, he thought, who am I kidding? He already sees it, but maybe this way he’ll let me be.

“You lingered outside the door for a good twenty-six seconds before coming in from the street, you took several seconds longer than usual to climb the stairs, you’ve been running your hands through your hair again, and instead of getting your customary cup of tea upon coming home, you have instead elected to sit and pretend to be unconscious for the last five minutes. Something is wrong, and you will tell me what it is, or you’ll be using that damn cane again, and then I’ll have to run you all over London to get you off it again.” The words snapped out like a whip and John, through the cloud of regrets and sadness that had thickened through the day, marvelled that the man could possibly have gotten any better at reading him since that first day in St. Barts. Yet here he was, after years of insane cases and stupid, _stupid_ absence, only to find that Sherlock was more in tune than ever, and now was actually paying attention. When the hell had that happened?

John opened his eyes and looked up at Sherlock, who stood, impassive, above him. “I had a bad day.”

“Obviously.”

John slammed his fist on the arm of his chair.  Of course. Of course he was painfully, stupidly, transparently _obvious_. He pushed himself out of the chair and stalked over to the couch. Running his hands through his hair, he started counting the bullet holes in the wall, a habit he’d developed while Sherlock had been “dead” when he needed to remind himself that once the man had been so vibrantly alive that he had filled up every corner of John’s life. He’d held onto the habit since Sherlock had come back, but now it was a way to remind himself that Sherlock was a complete idiot and that strangling his flatmate would not look good on a CV. Still, he didn’t turn around.

“A girl came in today. She’s been in before. Obviously spends most of her time on the streets. Probably turns tricks for cash. But she comes in for her exams and her tests and her birth control. Last few months, her visit got less… predictable. I’ve seen it enough. It wasn’t hard to tell she was on something. Probably more than one somethings. But there’s not much you can do. You try to get them to go for treatment. You try everything. But there’s nothing you can do, and you know that the next time you hear about them, it’ll be in the papers, and it’ll just be about one more tramp froze to death come winter.”

Sherlock hadn’t moved. Hadn’t blinked. He just looked at John like he was waiting for him to finish. John scrubbed his face with his hands. “It was just… bloody hell, Sherlock, I looked at her and I saw what Harry could have been like, what she could still be like. And, God help me, I saw you sitting there in the exam room. You like you could be, but aren’t, and you like you were when there was no one there, and I just thought that what if you hadn’t stopped the cocaine? What if you had stayed in those drug dens and never found out that chasing murders and keeping me up for days on end? I wouldn’t have you. You’d have been just another body on the street, and I… I don’t know where I’d be…”

John dropped onto the couch. He stared at the floor, flushed from emotion and embarrassment. He was so wrapped up in the old worries and guilt, because he’d just dumped all of that on Sherlock, and he knew that Sherlock didn’t deserve that – knew it down to his marrow that to put Sherlock back there, before he’d found his passion in mysteries was something close to cruel – that he didn’t notice that Sherlock had sat down next to him until the detective’s low, gentle voice rumbled so close that he could feel it in his chest.

“I caught the murderer today. He was a pharmacist. He used cold medication to poison his customers. The simpletons at the lab overlooked the over the counter drugs in the victims’ houses because, apparently, most of London has some sort of cold or flu, and the poison was slow acting enough that, by the time the victims died, the pills were already safely tucked away where they would be expected to be. But his favourite haunts, where he tested his little pills, were the same places I spent so much time in myself. When drugs were the only thing that could occupy me.

“It turns out that some of the occupants of those holes haven’t changed much. I found my old dealer. He was… well, Victor wasn’t a friend, but he wasn’t intolerable. Which was about as good as it got at the time. He’s hooked now, to the point where he can’t deal anymore because he uses up his own merchandise. He’ll take almost anything you give to him. Including pills laced with poison. It was stupid. So stupid. I should have seen what he was going to do, but I didn’t.”

John’s head snapped up. He stared at Sherlock wide-eyed and berated himself for not seeing it as soon as he’d walked in. That Sherlock hadn’t been in one of his usual moods. That Sherlock had been there at all. That there were pages of staff paper scattered across the floor, notes scrawled across the staves. The man had been composing, for Christ sake. He hadn’t composed since The Woman. How could he have been so wrapped up in himself that he didn’t see?

Sherlock glanced at him, “Don’t be an idiot John.”

John shook his head and put his hand on Sherlock’s shoulder. The muscles below his fingers were so tense they nearly quivered. “You weren’t finished,” he said softly.

Sherlock’s eyes softened, and he stared down at his hands, flexing his long fingers as if he could catch something that was slipping through them.  “He took the pills. He’d swallowed them before I even thought to act. You would have. You, John Watson, would have seen it. Because you _see_ people. I see cold, hard facts to the exclusion of all else. It makes me good at solving murders. It makes me shite at saving people.”

John’s fingers gripped tighter and he opened his mouth to speak.

Sherlock’s shockingly blue eyes snapped up to meet his. “No, John, it’s true. It’s true of our clients. And it’s true of me. If you weren’t here, It very well could have been me in that burnt out house, choking to death on whatever I could get my hands on. You, John, you keep me right.”

John blinked at the other man, unable to process the words right away. He knew Sherlock needed him, but he’d always thought it was a make-sure-there’s-milk, stop-experiment-spawned-fires-before-the-whole-kitchen-catches kind of need. Sherlock kept staring, fingers slowly curling and uncurling. The whole situation was so strange. Sherlock never shared, he never admitted, he never _fidgeted_. So John did the only thing he could think to do, the one thing he’d thought “what if-ed” into oblivion years ago. He moved his hand so that his fingers tangled in the detective’s curls and guided his head down for a kiss.

Sherlock stiffened, and his eyes widened in surprise. John’s lips were warm, slightly wind-roughened from the cold walk to Baker Street from the clinic, and they made no demands, but tentatively asked a question Sherlock never thought John would ask. Sherlock curled his fingers into John’s jumper and tugged him closer.

John tightened his fingers in Sherlock’s hair and broke the kiss. He pulled back, searching Sherlock’s eyes, saw the pupils blown wide with desire eclipsing the blue. He licked his lips and tried to breathe around the knot that had formed in his chest. “Are you sure?” He whispered, terrified of what the answer might be, but hope, hope he thought long buried, was rising, coiling his breath in his lungs like an over-stressed spring.

“Oh God, yes,” he

John grinned and pulled Sherlock’s lanky frame back towards him. This time, the kiss was anything but gentle. It was hard and fast. John’s lips moved over Sherlock’s with a fierce possessiveness that left Sherlock gasping. John swept his tongue in, running it provocatively over Sherlock’s lower lip before deepening the kiss. Sherlock reached up to cup John’s face, and rose to meet him, matching need for need, demand for demand.

Suddenly, John’s hands were moving. He tugged Sherlock’s shirt out of the waistband of his slacks, rucking up the fabric until he could smooth his hands over the lean expanse of chest beneath. He pushed lightly, urging Sherlock down onto the sofa cushions.

Sherlock eagerly complied, but refused to break the kiss, tugging John down with him until the detective felt John’s solid, comforting weight settle on top of him. He finally moved his hands from John’s face, running them across his shoulders and down his back to begin tugging at the hem of John’s jumper. By the time his fumbling fingers had managed to gain a purchase, John had completely unbuttoned Sherlock’s own shirt and, pulling back, wrapped his hands around Sherlock’s, tugging them away from his jumper and jeans.

“Not yet. I want to see you.”

Sherlock narrowed his eyes at John, his breath coming short and quick. “Only if I get to see you, too.”

Suddenly, John’s jumper was off and tossed across the room. Sherlock drank in the sight. He’d seen John’s bare chest countless times. He knew every version of John’s bare chest. The hard, military-honed muscle the man hid beneath his ridiculous jumpers, the small, courageous scar on his shoulder that proved that John Watson was the strongest, bravest man in all of existence, the light trail of hair that ran from his navel to below the waist line of his trousers, the way the skin glistened in the heat of London summers and how it looked still damp from the shower. But he’d never known how captivating it was displayed like this. For him. He reached out and traced the scar tenderly, running his fingers over and around it, then down , examining John’s chest like it was one of his experiments. John smiled. “Now you, Sherlock,” he said, “Show me.”

Sherlock sat up and tugged his arms out of the wrinkled mess of his shirt, and propped himself up on his elbows. “What do you see, John?” he asked.

John ran his hands over Sherlock’s pale chest. He felt the remnants of scars from cases he remembered, wounds he’d stitched himself. And he felt new ones, ones Sherlock had collected during those years that John didn’t like to think about. Scars that Sherlock had gotten trying to protect him. Scars that showed that his detective wasn’t a sociopath at all, high-functioning or otherwise, but that he was the best thing that had ever happened to John in all his years. He raised his eyes, looking Sherlock square in the face, wanting every word to drop into the other man’s mind like clues to an unsolvable mystery, to be filed and stored away in that wonderful, incredible mind. “That you’re beautiful. That you are brave, and kind, and strong, and that I love you.”

Sherlock’s eyes widened. “John, I—”

“No, shut up. Just once, be quiet,” Sherlock’s mouth snapped shut.  “I love you. You’re difficult and infuriating and can be a bloody idiot, but I love you. I don’t care that you once said you were married to your work. I don’t care that you leave fingers in the butter dish. Well, I do, but that’s not the point. The point is that until I found you, I never knew what coming home was like. That’s what you are. When I see you, I’m home.”

John waited, hands resting on Sherlock’s chest, feeling the weight of the detective’s gaze on his face. The moment stretch out and he waited for the whole thing to come crashing down around his ears, for Sherlock to utter some scathing retort, or to declare the results of his experiment “interesting” and leave him.

Those bright blue eyes blinked once, twice, then Sherlock’s entire face lit with joy. “You took your time,” he grinned, and sat up to grip John tight by the shoulders. “I love you too.”

John could have throttled him. Instead, he settled for kissing the smug expression of his detective’s face. Obviously, the man needed a distraction from his deductions if he could look so smug while saying “I love you.” John intended to keep him distracted for the rest of the night. Then they could both be smug in the morning.

The End

Happy Valentine’s Day

 


End file.
